In the production of yarns or strands for textile use, it is common practice in the glass fiber industry to draw glass filaments from a molten glass source. This source is contained in a metallic container provided with a multiplicity of orifices or tips on the bottom through which the molten glass flows to form the glass fiber filaments. These filaments are passed over an applicator which applies a binder to the filaments. The filaments are then gathered into strands which are wound at high speed on a forming tube placed on a rotating collet to form a forming package containing the fiber glass strand. These packages are wet as formed and are typically dried in ovens prior to transferring the strand to a twist frame so that the strand can be twisted and placed on a bobbin.
The binders normally employed for textile strands are starch based materials. This binder is burned off of the strand after it is woven into cloth and leaves little or no residue on the cloth so that the cloth can then be treated with the various finishes used by the weaver with uniform effect on the cloth.
It has been a particularly bothersome problem in the glass fiber manufacturing art in drying forming packages having starch sized strands thereon that migration of the binder or size occurs often. This migration leads to an uneven distribution of binder to the layers of strand on the forming package and thus nonuniform strand. Further, the twist frame operation is costly and bobbins presently used carry small quantities of strand thereon which require the user to make frequent bobbin changes in the loom operations used to produce cloth.